In this photo taken Friday, June 5, 2015, an elderly Chinese woman is pushed in a wheelchair near the entrance to the Temple of Heaven park in Beijing.

Associated Press

China’s policy makers have long accepted the need for workers to delay retirement to ease social and fiscal pressures from a rapidly aging population. Few, however, could agree on how to do it.

This week, state-backed researchers fueled fresh debate on the issue with a new proposal on how to coax more productive years out of China’s silver-haired generation. They called for gradually extending the country’s statutory retirement thresholds over the next three decades, culminating in a flat retirement age of 65 years.

But their plan is proving unpopular. It is particularly striking a nerve among some women, who in China can retire between five and ten years earlier than men. The statutory retirement age for men is set at 60 years.

On social media, many female users mocked what they perceived as selective pursuit of gender equality.

“In 2045, would there be equal pay between men and women? Would men be able to give birth?” a user, who identified as female, wrote on the popular Weibo microblogging service. “Chinese society, in reality, is rife with gender inequality; why bring about gender equality in retirement age?” another user wrote.

In an online survey, the state-run China National Radio found nearly 80% of respondents objected to setting a flat retirement age for men and women.

“Delaying retirement is understandable, but setting the same retirement age for men and women isn’t compatible with our country’s conditions,” CNR quoted a Weibo user as saying. “Men would only have to work five more years, while women would have to work ten years longer. And women still have to face family pressures, so it’s clearly unsuitable.”

Authorities could begin extending retirement thresholds—for men and women—at a fixed pace, starting in 2018. CASS researchers suggest adding a year to the female retirement age every three years, while doing so for men every six years.

Beijing could also allow flexibility for workers to bring forward or delay their retirement by up to five years, on the condition that their pension payouts would be adjusted accordingly, CASS said.

An elderly man is pushed in a wheelchair at the Temple of Heaven park in Beijing.

Associated Press

“China currently has large numbers of low-age retirees, and developing their potential is the main direction from here onward,” the CASS researchers said in the report. “Projections show that pushing back retirement ages could effectively improve the urban labor supply and increase the urban [working-age] population.”

Few in government and academia would dispute this rationale, though many have squabbled over the timeline for implementing changes.

Yin Weimin, China’s minister in charge of human resources and social security, said in March that a potential scenario might involve a two-month increase to the retirement age in the first year, followed by another four months the following year.

China’s policy makers have struggled to mitigate the impact from shrinking labor pools, which pose growing burdens on the country’s pension system. One way is to lift depressed birth rates. Beijing in October said it will abandon the one-child policy and allow couples to have two children—a move experts say will likely prove too little, too late to arrest China’s demographic decline.

Another approach is to boost existing labor supply by having workers retire later. But any attempt to do so is likely to incur political blowback, as seen in the social media reaction to the CASS report.

“Can’t afford a second child, can’t retire when you’re old, can’t find work when you graduate,” wrote a Weibo user, in response to a news report on the CASS proposals. “Under these beautiful policies, it’s difficult for us to get by.”

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